Speaker
Description
More recently commercial nuclear propulsion received wide and renewed attention from the deep-sea maritime transportation sector due to marine fuel prices increase as a result of current energy crisis and IMO’s 2023 strategy on the reduction of GHG emissions from ships, demonstrating the practical importance of this technology. The main topic of discussion is around past, existing and future training requirements and how maritime universities can incorporate essential courses on traditional nuclear technology alongside high-fidelity digital twin models that can also be used to control predictive maintenance and develop model-based full detection systems for innovative advanced reactor designs. Hence, this study will focus on today’s digitalization, communication and automation technologies that can use computation as a direct tool to shorten the development cycle of new nuclear propulsion technologies as well as reduce crew size and operational requirements, making the transition to nuclear propulsion in deep-sea shipping less demanding. The success of nuclear-powered commercial ships, operating with reduced crew, supported by advanced automated technology will demand new training methods where the future crew can learn the necessary skills. To develop such training methods, and ensure the necessary quality and level of safety, it is necessary to use advanced simulators that allows training with nuclear technology, marine technology and traditional skills allowing practice to merge into suitable skills for the future seafarers. These simulators needs to be developed and this study will address this need and be an important step towards commercial nuclear propulsion. Furthermore, the current status on availability of trained mariners and the maritime industry’s ability to supply the amount of skilled crew necessary for nuclear propulsion will be also addressed at the end.
